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Microsoft is making Excel’s formulas easier

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Re: Microsoft is making Excel’s formulas easier

#121

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

hermitcrab wrote: post #56
logicallee wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(not OP) over on reddit people are saying it is fantastic for giving them excel formulas they ask for. I guess it means the formulas work!

That is one of the big issues with AIs like ChatGPT though. It gives you a plausible sounding answer, but that answer might be total BS. It doesn't tell you what degree of confidence it has in the answer. Maybe the formulas it gives are right 100%, 99% or 0% of the time.

Good lord, it doesn't have any confidence at all. It's just a database query with a lossy compression step.

What's the confidence level of copy-pasting random code snippets from Stackoverflow?

Re: Microsoft is making Excel’s formulas easier

#122

Post by nnspired »

EMM_386 wrote: post #89
spockz wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t this exactly what Microsoft access was invented for? I’ve seen technical but non-cs people built magical things in forms by (or views). And when access got the ability to talk to MSSQL it really blew up. The quintessential low-code environment. I wonder why it never caught on.

I was hired a couple decades ago to replace a Microsoft Access system that was written by a non-software engineer and was running an entire company with around 50 users with all sorts of complex forms. It got a little too big and I rewrote it as a C# desktop application talking to a SQL Server, but it was impressive what this person was able to create with no real programming knowledge and just Microsoft Access.

[dead]

Re: Microsoft is making Excel’s formulas easier

#123

Post by trobertson »

jiggawatts wrote: post #71
spockz wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t this exactly what Microsoft access was invented for? I’ve seen technical but non-cs people built magical things in forms by (or views). And when access got the ability to talk to MSSQL it really blew up. The quintessential low-code environment. I wonder why it never caught on.

Microsoft essentially abandoned it. They hoped that a bunch of random Azure services would be its replacement, but they're too scattered and incomplete compared to Access.

It's not abandoned. Access still has an engineering team working on it, and that team still goes to conferences to talk with their users. Source: I work in the same org as them, and ate lunch daily with a few of them before the pandemic hit.

Re: Microsoft is making Excel’s formulas easier

#124

Post by gadtfly »

dan-robertson wrote: post #109
gadtfly wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This almost certainly is GPT. OpenAI has an exclusive licensing agreement with Microsoft.

Why do you think it isn’t due to the programming by example work that MSR have been doing for over 5 years and which already partly made it into excel as flash fill?

You're right, "almost certainly" is far too strong. I was unaware of that research, and read a lot into that this is only being released in the web version. And am just generally anticipating a wave of LLM applications to eat everything that could be even remotely, abstractly reframed as an "autocomplete" task. That it only works in English is also evidence against, with GPT-3 you'd get every language it knows pretty much for free.

Re: Microsoft is making Excel’s formulas easier

#125

Post by FormerBandmate »

twobitshifter wrote: post #87
FormerBandmate wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excel also makes it easier to experiment. Pandas requires you to change an entire column which can frequently be processor-intensive, take forever, and be hard to understand. With Excel, you can just take a random cell, try something out, and if it comes up with nonsense, undo it

Why not df.head()… ?

That can also take a while, and it isn’t as easy to view the values side by side. Excel is simpler (although way less capable) a lot of the time

Re: Microsoft is making Excel’s formulas easier

#126

Post by vanviegen »

merouan wrote: post #103
axelf4 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As my professor said: All good statistics is done before you have looked at the data.

True, for clean data. You can’t clean data without looking at it (a lot), though.

If you have data that's so 'dirty' that you can't decide on the filtering rules in advance (or based on only historic data), then what you have is garbage, not data. Therefore, we could call the art of shaping this into meaningful stories garbage science.

Re: Microsoft is making Excel’s formulas easier

#127

Post by hermitcrab »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #121
hermitcrab wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is one of the big issues with AIs like ChatGPT though. It gives you a plausible sounding answer, but that answer might be total BS. It doesn't tell you what degree of confidence it has in the answer. Maybe the formulas it gives are right 100%, 99% or 0% of the time.

Good lord, it doesn't have any confidence at all. It's just a database query with a lossy compression step. What's the confidence level of copy-pasting random code snippets from Stackoverflow?

With Stackoverflow you can base your confidence in an answer on:

-the number of upvotes

-the reputation of the poster

-the post - sometimes posters will say "I haven't tested this"

-comments

With ChatGPT you have no idea.

Re: Microsoft is making Excel’s formulas easier

#128

Post by jmkni »

russfink wrote: post #119
jmkni wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For fun, I took this formula and asked ChatGPT to convert it to a VBA Function (with comments): Function extractText(cell As Range) As String ' Declare an array of search terms Dim searchTerms As Variant searchTerms = Array("Banner", "EBL2", "Movie Art", "Use as is", "TTT", "Generic") ' Initialize start and end positions to 0 Dim startPos As Long startPos = 0 Dim endPos As Long endPos = 0 ' Loop through search terms…

Did it write the comments, too?

Yes, you can give it any snippet of code and ask it to add comments (the accuracy of the comments can be hit or miss though)

Re: Microsoft is making Excel’s formulas easier

#130

Post by jiggawatts »

trobertson wrote: post #123
jiggawatts wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft essentially abandoned it. They hoped that a bunch of random Azure services would be its replacement, but they're too scattered and incomplete compared to Access.

It's not abandoned. Access still has an engineering team working on it, and that team still goes to conferences to talk with their users. Source: I work in the same org as them, and ate lunch daily with a few of them before the pandemic hit.

Sigh.

Silverlight had positive sounding blog posts, etc... right up until its official death.

These megacorps never officially announce a product's demise, not while they can sell it. You have to read between the lines.

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